


Stranger in a Strange Land

by Zafaria



Category: Wizard101
Genre: Is it wiz though?, is it really?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 08:05:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18890560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zafaria/pseuds/Zafaria
Summary: Writing prompt - a 26-sentence story where each consecutive sentence begins with the next letter of the alphabet





	Stranger in a Strange Land

"Almost time," she called from inside the swamp hut.

Bog water trickled by, passing with its odoriferous, sulphur stench. Cradling a book in her arms and gripping her stave with her left hand, Janus was on the shore, waiting for the witch in the hut to finish the spell.

Death was near.

Earlier, Janus drank from the Well of Annwn and saw the other side, teetering in a place between hazy consciousness and eternal darkening of the will-o-wisps that burned in her visage. For now, though, Janus looked a little sickly and worn; the sensation was not familiar, she supposed, but she remembered the same feeling of her face melting in the Well of Souls (although she had only walked through), and on the hot comet-face of Xibalba. 

Going through the book, she awaited Saffron's call. Her mind was busy, and although Janus had faith in her friends, she recited her prayers silently. Inside the hut, Saffron too recited her prayers as she stood frozen in front of the face of a mantle clock, a clove pinched between her slender fingers and dangling in the air. Just as the minute-hand snuck past the seven, Saffron yelled out.

"Keep it short, spend as little time in that place between memory and reality as possible,” Saffron said as she looked up to the ceiling. "Lord, deliver us from this unamenable place," she whispered.

Meeting her gaze through the ajar door, Janus furrowed her brow then turned to the book, reading the pages through the fuzzy lantern light as bugs whirred around the flames. Nearby, an owl cooed in the night, and the sense of direness finally began welling up in Janus's chest.

On the inside of the house, Saffron looked on with her big, bloodshot eyes and mangled hair. Pinching the corners of the pages, Janus turned them and read faster and faster, until she finally reached the passage she was looking for, ran up to the doorstep and began reading aloud. Quietly, Saffron stood until Janus finished the passage, then shuffled hurriedly in the cottage to gather the last few jars and liquids for the spell; after she had emptied the contents of all the bottles into a cauldron with a satisfying plop, she shoved a flask of the viscous grey nectar and a crystal into Janus's hands and pushed her out the door of the cottage. Saffron would sit quietly and wait for her friend to return from the Other Side, but for now, it was the flickering image of Janus fading into that ghastly realm whom was tasked with the true quest.

There in the other realm, Janus walked up to a devastated castle painted against a pitchy black, long grey, slab stairs floating in a disjointed staircase over the emptiness. Unvexed, Janus stared at the decrepit mockery of the Castle, a long-departed vision, a dream, of a grand kingdom past before the death of its king. Very carefully, she pulled her feet up and stood on the first rock slab, judging her pathway to the top of the Castle; she realized it would be a pathway of leaps between floating collections of bricks, a race to reach the insides of the Castle before Mallory killed the King again.

Worry rose again in her chest.

Xibalba and the Well of Souls crept back into her mind, igniting her fears that she really was away in the deep dark recesses of a place and time untouchable to any of her friends, her sister, or her allies.

Yes, it began to sink in that in this ghost of the Kingdom of Avalon that would soon become rife with pain and chaos, she was the sole heir.

Zagging stairs winding around the crumbling tower and the quiet whispers of dead knights and kings beckoned her. 

 


End file.
